The profiles apparently belonging to attractive women are utilized to lure victims

Experts warn Instagram users that spammers are trying to trick them into signing up for premium mobile services by promising them all sorts of prizes.

The attackers rely on profiles of attractive women that appear to be followed by thousands of users. These fake profiles are utilized to post comments such as: “Hi there, Get a FREE Game in my Profile, OPEN it up, Get 85.90$ :-) xx.”

The Symantec researcher who has investigated these scams reports that the “women’s” profiles contain a shortened link to a premium mobile service, which offers videos of cute animals for a mere fee of 4.5 EUR ($5.4) per month plus WAP/GPRS/UMTS charges.

The amount might not seem like much, but it’s not worth spending on videos that are already freely available on YouTube.

Furthermore, once the phone number is handed over, they can automatically sign you up for other services, not to mention the fact that they will probably spam you with all sorts of advertisements.

Almost 10,000 users have already clicked on the shortened link in just over a month.